November 13,2002
Just as you expect the tide of hormones to commence turning amnesiac leaving you to plough ahead efficiently, genderless and libidoless, there is the realisation that their last gasp is going to be stronger than anything preceding this mid-life watershed of sudden womanhood. Does life begin at fourty? I think not. But I might have just begun to emerge from the long chrysalis of some inchoate gender, a delayed blooming whose dramatically tardy arrival is likely to disturb the proceedings of the evening. The women, most of them, who appeared to have been in this state of full womanhood for far longer than I, were usually the women that men friends married. They were not the people I chose first as friends; I was never assured that I could converse in their language. I admired them in the way one does an incomprehensible mystery, watching their virtues, unable to navigate the synapses between their ability to be wife, mother, thinker, worker, friend, domesticator. I was relieved to go to the boozer with their husbands. A brief stint in Paris left me perplexed by the complexities of lingerie, perfume, and heels; bewildered by those gorgeous, genteel whores haunting bookstores. Now I want to join them. Heel-up, upholster my breasts, confit dug legs, and think. I want to be all of those things I scorned along with all of the things I value. The rigour of another language’s grammar has suddenly started to be less opaque. If I go missing you may find me dancing around a Maypole, my impossibly high heels gently pock-marking the grass, my clothing an uncanny symphony of drape and wrap, children flying out of my limbs. No irony in sight, merely the inevitability of a late onslaught of tertiary sexual characteristics.
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November 13,2002
Just as you expect the tide of hormones to commence turning amnesiac leaving you to plough ahead efficiently, genderless and libidoless, there is the realisation that their last gasp is going to be stronger than anything preceding this mid-life watershed of sudden womanhood. Does life begin at fourty? I think not. But I might have just begun to emerge from the long chrysalis of some inchoate gender, a delayed blooming whose dramatically tardy arrival is likely to disturb the proceedings of the evening. The women, most of them, who appeared to have been in this state of full womanhood for far longer than I, were usually the women that men friends married. They were not the people I chose first as friends; I was never assured that I could converse in their language. I admired them in the way one does an incomprehensible mystery, watching their virtues, unable to navigate the synapses between their ability to be wife, mother, thinker, worker, friend, domesticator. I was relieved to go to the boozer with their husbands. A brief stint in Paris left me perplexed by the complexities of lingerie, perfume, and heels; bewildered by those gorgeous, genteel whores haunting bookstores. Now I want to join them. Heel-up, upholster my breasts, confit dug legs, and think. I want to be all of those things I scorned along with all of the things I value. The rigour of another language’s grammar has suddenly started to be less opaque. If I go missing you may find me dancing around a Maypole, my impossibly high heels gently pock-marking the grass, my clothing an uncanny symphony of drape and wrap, children flying out of my limbs. No irony in sight, merely the inevitability of a late onslaught of tertiary sexual characteristics.
- rachael 11-13-2002 5:46 pm